Lifting restrictions on council borrowing will enable them to build more homes

“The borrowing cap means councils can’t borrow in the same way as housing associations to leverage in private finance to start to build at scale. Relaxing the limits should enable greater house building (although our work has shown some councils are cautious to borrow more and others prefer to invest in existing stock which sometimes fails to meet the decent homes standard). Nevertheless there is a strong case for councils to be able to borrow more, whether or not this could be done off the government’s balance sheet.”

– Paul Hunter, head of research at the Smith Institute

Building more homes will help to control house prices

“Greater availability will bring prices down. If we make more land available, housing will be cheaper - land prices are our biggest obstacle to new build projects accounting for about 50% of the total cost.”

“We have come a long way over the course of this parliament where four years ago no one was talking about building new communities. Now we have emerging cross-party support for bringing forward a new generation of garden cities as part of the solution to tackling Britain’s chronic housing crisis. We now need to focus on delivery and hold all parties to account.”

– Kate Henderson, chief executive at the Town and Country Planning Association

Better off social tenants could pay higher rents

If a household living in housing association accommodation can afford to pay a higher rent, then housing associations should be able to charge higher rents, subject to an affordability review. Both the higher rental income and the recycled capital grant should then by ringfenced for the development of more affordable homes.

– Angelo Sommariva is public affairs and policy manager at Moat

The private sector needs to pull its weight

“Action needs to be taken to address landbanking, where private developers sit on land with planning permission but don’t build the homes. ‘Use it or lose it’ powers should be implemented, allowing councils to impose escalating fees on developers who refuse to build the homes they have been given permission for. This could be backed up by the threat of compulsory purchase orders for the very worst offenders.”

– Tom Copley, Labour politician and member of the London Assembly

There needs to be an debate about building on the green belt

“We need to step away from the idea of the greenbelt being a sacred cow and have a proper, open debate and some sensible scrutiny of our approach and indeed specific sites around our cities. We’re certainly not advocating a wholesale attack on the countryside or building over beauty spots, but a proportion of sites earmarked as green belt around London are far from idyllic. We have to get down off our hobby horses and be more pragmatic.”

– Mick Sweeney

We need to make things better for renters

“As well as increasing supply, we need to look at how to get a better deal for England’s nine million renters. We are not going to build our way out of the crisis overnight. Reforming the private rented sector costs little and helps people now.”

– Katharine Sacks-Jones, head of policy and campaigns at Crisis

We need to change attitudes to social housing

“The growing stigma attached to social housing (along with a chronic undersupply and massive funding cuts) is perpetuated by endless tabloid headlines selling the myth that ‘benefit scroungers’ are holed-up in five bedroom mansions in Kensington. What the tabloids fail to mention is that a key function of social housing is to provide accommodation that is affordable to people on low incomes: the people who work in our hospitals, drive our buses and run our nurseries. It also provides a range of functions for people at risk of poverty including providing vital security to people who are disabled or unemployed.”

– Kate Henderson

Conversations about housing and welfare shouldn’t exist in isolation

“At the moment government policy on housing and welfare is not as joined up as it should be. For example, housing policy is pushing lower income groups into more expensive tenures (affordable rent and the private sector) at that the same that welfare policy is focused on trying to reduce spending on housing benefit. We need to review the relationship between these two areas of policy and focus on getting people into homes they can afford (by building more homes for social rent and tackling issues around low pay and insecure jobs), if we want to get the housing benefit bill under control.”

– David Pipe, policy and practice officer at the Chartered Institute of Housing

A ‘one size fits all’ approach is not the answer

“It’s great that there is now cross party recognition that there is a housing crisis but as it stands Whitehall treat the country as if its all the same - its not. We need to build more homes in the places that need them the most such as cities and their surrounding areas. Of these cities, we need to target the ones with the least affordable homes. At the moment this isn’t happening. Cities lack the tools they need to meet local demands and priorities - this is holding back them back.”

– Edward Clarke, analyst at Centre for Cities

Real change requires cross-party commitment

“There is still not enough political will to take the long-term decisions necessary to really tackle the housing crisis. I would like to see all political parties work together to form a long term plan. This is not a problem that is solvable over night but it is solvable within a generation if there is sufficient political commitment.”

– Katharine Sacks-Jones

The house building market needs a broader range of providers

“One of the bigger problems holding back house building is having a broad range of providers. By this I mean things like self-build, SME builders, new entrants to the developer market, etc, as well as alternatives like local authority and housing association developments. The diversity of provision elsewhere in the world stands in contrast to England.”